The Daily Star
Tuesday, January 28 2014
By Michael Glackin
Sixty-nine years ago this week, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in southwest Poland.
That the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the site of what is thought to be the largest mass murder in history, should have coincided with the release of a report exposing the atrocities of Bashar Assad’s regime, was not lost on one of the report’s authors.
Speaking to me last week, Sue Black, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist and co-author of the report, which accused the Assad regime of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, said: “It is ironic that we are so close to the Auschwitz anniversary. Because examining the photographs of those starved remains was like going back in time and looking at photographs of the concentration camps. I have been doing forensic work for over 30 years and this is the worst I have seen. It is absolutely horrendous.”
Considering that Black led the British forensic team that exhumed the mass graves of Kosovo in 1999 and later identified victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, you can appreciate this is not hyperbole.
The photographs of prisoners killed by the Syrian security services and smuggled out of Syria by “Caesar,” an Assad regime photographer and defector, are, she insists, evidence of the torture and brutal murder of some 11,000 people.
Black is a scientist. She relies on hard evidence to reach conclusions, and for that reason retains an objective, unemotional detachment from the dark deeds her skills lead her to investigate. It is her painstakingly clinical approach that makes her conclusions about the suffering of those shown in the report all the more damning.
“In Kosovo, horrific as it was, one could understand the conflict side of things, and the victims were killed by gunshots. In the Asian tsunami, it was an unfortunate natural disaster. But here, the intensity of the one-to-one infliction of injury is horrendous. The deliberate personal suffering that has been inflicted on the victims is truly shocking.”
The images, which Black carefully examined, came from a single location inside Syria, and since more than half of the photographs were taken by a single cameraman, it is realistic to assume that they only represent a fraction of the regime’s victims. Yet even allowing for the fact that the images are just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of prisoners killed by the regime since the uprising in Syria in 2011, the murders are still not on the scale of Auschwitz in size.
But Black’s comparison comes from the systematic nature of the torture and killing, what she calls the “incredible organization, the coordinated, cold blooded, efficiency” of the process of torture and death. It is this that she says bears the chilling resemblance to the Auschwitz example.
Black told me more than 60 percent of the bodies showed evidence of starvation, “not thin, but clinically starved so there is almost zero body fat.” She said ligature marks found on necks of victims indicated death by slow strangulation, with a garrote-type implement that resembled the fan belt on a car. Many bodies had been severely beaten, and some had their eyes gouged out. Others showed signs of electrocution, while some were burned.
“You do not starve quickly, it takes time,” she said. “Then there is the brutality of the beatings. But beyond that, there is the cost to the families of those young men. Like a stone thrown into the water, there is a ripple effect, it impacts on families, and beyond families onto an entire nation.”
The evidence provided by Caesar should increase the likelihood of Assad facing a war crimes tribunal – he is of course already facing investigation by war crimes prosecutors over the Sarin gas attack that killed up to 1,300 civilians last August. It has also lead to renewed calls for the West to finally act, and acknowledge that talk alone will not achieve its avowed aim of ending Assad rule.
But don’t hold your breath. For one thing, the United States has been aware of the Caesar images since last November. The British government couldn’t confirm when it first learnt of the photographs, but Foreign Secretary William Hague said they were “compelling and horrific,” and that the perpetrators must be held to account. But the reality is that the United Kingdom is compelled to do nothing.
Just four months ago parliament, which includes many of those expressing horror and faux sympathy last week – such as Labour leader Ed Miliband and his foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander – led the parliamentary vote against British involvement in Syria.
The West balked at a meaningful display of its outrage at the use of chemical weapons and by doing so aided and abetted an evil regime, enabling it to carry out more atrocities. Other young men in the regime’s prisons will be tortured and starved and slowly murdered today or tomorrow, and their abused bodies will be photographed by other Caesars. We can blame the likes of Russia or Iran, but the truth is, many in the West do not care about Syria.
What the Red Army found at Auschwitz confirmed beyond doubt that World War II, the destruction of the Nazi regime, was a necessary and noble war. On a visit to Auschwitz in 2005, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said: “The story of the camp reminds us that evil is real. It must be called by its name and must be confronted.”
Cheney’s words harken back to a time when the civilized world matched its words with deeds. Everyone agrees that the Caesar images reveal a deep-rooted evil. The failure to confront it today means that tyranny and fear is prevailing. As the 18th century statesman Edmund Burke succinctly put it: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 28, 2014, on page 7.
Tuesday, 28 January 2014
Monday, 20 January 2014
The West may pay for its inaction in Syria
The Daily Star,
Friday, January 17, 2014.
By Michael Glackin
For months, while the atrocities and body count in Syria have risen, the West, and the United Kingdom in particular, has insisted that the often-postponed Geneva II conference, now scheduled for Jan. 22, is the lever that will take power away from President Bashar Assad and end the bloodshed in Syria.
Speculation about backroom deals with Russia and Iran paving the way for a diplomatic breakthrough have been making the rounds for months. However, so far Geneva II has only succeeded in pushing an already weak and divided moderate opposition movement to the brink of collapse.
The recent refusal of the Syrian National Council – arguably the most important of the moderate opposition groupings – to go to Geneva was expected. But the Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella group created by the West to represent all opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army, is also bitterly divided and has yet to confirm its attendance. Meetings held by the coalition last week descended into chaos, forcing it to postpone a final decision until Jan. 17, days before the conference begins.
The Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), both affiliated with Al-Qaeda, have of course not been invited. Many of the armed Syrian opposition groups reject the very idea of negotiating with the Assad regime and don’t recognize the authority of the Syrian National Coalition.
Geneva II is an increasingly pathetic sideshow of a tragedy that those who will gather in Switzerland will be powerless to relieve or stop. Having spectacularly humiliated itself with hollow military threats for nearly three years, the West will add failed diplomacy to the wreckage of its Syria policy.
The United States and the U.K. are now busy arming the fervently pro-Iranian and pro-Assad regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as it struggles to combat Sunni Al-Qaeda-linked militias. Their previous hostility to the Syrian leadership has evaporated in the face of what is perceived as a worse threat.
The need to supply arms to the increasingly tottering regime in Iraq stems partly from the West’s inaction in Syria. This created the space for radical Sunni militias to become the main opposition on the ground to the Assad regime and wage a war against Alawites and Shiites. A similar picture is forming in Lebanon where bombings are occurring with familiar and frightening regularity. The continuing bloodshed in Syria is even starting to seriously threaten political stability in Turkey.
But the flames of the West’s disastrous foreign policy toward Syria are no longer just burning in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. They are poised to reach Europe as well.
There may have been little domestic support for British Prime Minister David Cameron in taking a firm line with the Assad regime, but increasingly the British public is becoming aware of the cost to national security of the West’s failure to stand up for right against might in Syria. There are now over 40,000 foreign jihadists fighting there, including, according to recent estimates, up to 400 British citizens, mainly from Pakistani backgrounds, along with some Sudanese and Syrians from the U.K.
With radicalized Britons having been exposed to the extremist views of the likes of the Nusra Front and ISIS (most British jihadists tend to fight alongside the latter), as well as trained by them, concerns are growing that they will return to the U.K. and unleash a campaign of violence. Indeed, a report in the New York Times on Jan. 10 appeared to confirm that Al-Qaeda affiliated groups were recruiting Westerners in Syria to carry out attacks at home.
The fear is that returning fighters will want to punish the U.K. for abandoning Syria’s Sunnis. Such a view will have been reinforced by a former U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker.
He recently wrote that the West should engage Assad on counterterrorism, because “he is not as bad as the jihadists who would take over in his absence.”
Last October, British police arrested two men who had recently returned from Syria and were allegedly linked to a terror plot within the U.K. And in November, the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, told a parliamentary hearing that the “interaction” of Britons fighting with radical groups in Syria was a “very important strand of the threat” the U.K. faced.
Parker said, “The attractiveness to these groupings is that they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country.”
The British suicide bombers who carried out the July 7, 2005, London bombings, which killed 52 people, had also made contact with radical Islamist groups abroad. Two more British Muslims who had become “radicalized” during visits overseas are due to be sentenced this month for the brutal murder of an off-duty soldier in the middle of a busy London street last year.
It is precisely this sort of unorganized terror attack, carried out by so called lone wolves acting spontaneously, that are impossible for the security forces to prevent. And it is the type of attack they fear the returning jihadists will commit.
In a bid to combat the threat, British citizens who fight in Syria are being stripped of their citizenship to prevent them from returning to the U.K. The government has revoked the passports of 20 people this year, more than in the previous two and a half years combined.
But it is not just the U.K. that faces a threat. The International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London says the number of European fighters in Syria has tripled to 1,900 in the last year. The number reported from France quadrupled to 412 (although President Francois Hollande gave a higher figure of 700 this week), while Belgium has the highest per capita rate with almost 300 fighters.
The West’s Syria strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. Assad remains in power, the region is dangerously unstable and Europe is facing the increased danger of terror attacks by its own citizens. Somehow, the futility of Geneva II sums up the entire fiasco. The West keeps fiddling, and Syria keeps burning.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 17, 2014, on page 7.
Friday, January 17, 2014.
By Michael Glackin
For months, while the atrocities and body count in Syria have risen, the West, and the United Kingdom in particular, has insisted that the often-postponed Geneva II conference, now scheduled for Jan. 22, is the lever that will take power away from President Bashar Assad and end the bloodshed in Syria.
Speculation about backroom deals with Russia and Iran paving the way for a diplomatic breakthrough have been making the rounds for months. However, so far Geneva II has only succeeded in pushing an already weak and divided moderate opposition movement to the brink of collapse.
The recent refusal of the Syrian National Council – arguably the most important of the moderate opposition groupings – to go to Geneva was expected. But the Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella group created by the West to represent all opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army, is also bitterly divided and has yet to confirm its attendance. Meetings held by the coalition last week descended into chaos, forcing it to postpone a final decision until Jan. 17, days before the conference begins.
The Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), both affiliated with Al-Qaeda, have of course not been invited. Many of the armed Syrian opposition groups reject the very idea of negotiating with the Assad regime and don’t recognize the authority of the Syrian National Coalition.
Geneva II is an increasingly pathetic sideshow of a tragedy that those who will gather in Switzerland will be powerless to relieve or stop. Having spectacularly humiliated itself with hollow military threats for nearly three years, the West will add failed diplomacy to the wreckage of its Syria policy.
The United States and the U.K. are now busy arming the fervently pro-Iranian and pro-Assad regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as it struggles to combat Sunni Al-Qaeda-linked militias. Their previous hostility to the Syrian leadership has evaporated in the face of what is perceived as a worse threat.
The need to supply arms to the increasingly tottering regime in Iraq stems partly from the West’s inaction in Syria. This created the space for radical Sunni militias to become the main opposition on the ground to the Assad regime and wage a war against Alawites and Shiites. A similar picture is forming in Lebanon where bombings are occurring with familiar and frightening regularity. The continuing bloodshed in Syria is even starting to seriously threaten political stability in Turkey.
But the flames of the West’s disastrous foreign policy toward Syria are no longer just burning in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. They are poised to reach Europe as well.
There may have been little domestic support for British Prime Minister David Cameron in taking a firm line with the Assad regime, but increasingly the British public is becoming aware of the cost to national security of the West’s failure to stand up for right against might in Syria. There are now over 40,000 foreign jihadists fighting there, including, according to recent estimates, up to 400 British citizens, mainly from Pakistani backgrounds, along with some Sudanese and Syrians from the U.K.
With radicalized Britons having been exposed to the extremist views of the likes of the Nusra Front and ISIS (most British jihadists tend to fight alongside the latter), as well as trained by them, concerns are growing that they will return to the U.K. and unleash a campaign of violence. Indeed, a report in the New York Times on Jan. 10 appeared to confirm that Al-Qaeda affiliated groups were recruiting Westerners in Syria to carry out attacks at home.
The fear is that returning fighters will want to punish the U.K. for abandoning Syria’s Sunnis. Such a view will have been reinforced by a former U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker.
He recently wrote that the West should engage Assad on counterterrorism, because “he is not as bad as the jihadists who would take over in his absence.”
Last October, British police arrested two men who had recently returned from Syria and were allegedly linked to a terror plot within the U.K. And in November, the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, told a parliamentary hearing that the “interaction” of Britons fighting with radical groups in Syria was a “very important strand of the threat” the U.K. faced.
Parker said, “The attractiveness to these groupings is that they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country.”
The British suicide bombers who carried out the July 7, 2005, London bombings, which killed 52 people, had also made contact with radical Islamist groups abroad. Two more British Muslims who had become “radicalized” during visits overseas are due to be sentenced this month for the brutal murder of an off-duty soldier in the middle of a busy London street last year.
It is precisely this sort of unorganized terror attack, carried out by so called lone wolves acting spontaneously, that are impossible for the security forces to prevent. And it is the type of attack they fear the returning jihadists will commit.
In a bid to combat the threat, British citizens who fight in Syria are being stripped of their citizenship to prevent them from returning to the U.K. The government has revoked the passports of 20 people this year, more than in the previous two and a half years combined.
But it is not just the U.K. that faces a threat. The International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London says the number of European fighters in Syria has tripled to 1,900 in the last year. The number reported from France quadrupled to 412 (although President Francois Hollande gave a higher figure of 700 this week), while Belgium has the highest per capita rate with almost 300 fighters.
The West’s Syria strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. Assad remains in power, the region is dangerously unstable and Europe is facing the increased danger of terror attacks by its own citizens. Somehow, the futility of Geneva II sums up the entire fiasco. The West keeps fiddling, and Syria keeps burning.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 17, 2014, on page 7.
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
The West abandons its allies in Syria
The Daily Star
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
By Michael Glackin
The fake sign language interpreter at Nelson’s Mandela’s memorial service wasn’t the only person indulging in meaningless gestures last week. While the interpreter did what amounted to a four-hour version of the Macarena, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to send equally confusing and worthless signals himself, on Syria.
The decision by both the United Kingdom and the United States to “suspend” assistance to a moderate Syrian rebel force, in the face of rising Islamist influence, was a bitter blow to the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army. It underscores their, and indeed the West’s, increasingly marginal role in Syria’s fate.
The FSA and SNC need Western backing to maintain a semblance of credibility and to stop fighters from joining Al-Qaeda-backed groups and other extremist Islamist groups. The West needs the moderate opposition to be effective. The nonlethal provided aid didn’t amount to much, but the symbolism of its suspension will convince everyone from President Bashar Assad to rebel fighters on the ground that an already muddled Western strategy toward Syria is in total disarray.
It also sends a clear signal to those fighting in Syria that the opposition movement that the West helped create cannot rely on the West for even token support. Recall that Cameron successfully overturned the European Union arms embargo on Syria last May in a move intended to “send a clear message to Assad,” but has failed to send as much as a pea shooter to the FSA. Small wonder the extremists, along with Iran and Russia, are in the ascendant.
The aid suspension indicates that the West believes the moderates in the Syrian opposition cannot hold the ring in Syria any longer. While the British Foreign Office insists the move is temporary, it was unable to say when the support would resume.
The events that led to the decision appear to be pretty straightforward: The takeover of Free Syrian Army bases in northern Syria, including the headquarters of the Syrian Military Council, by fighters from the Islamic Front, which recently broke with the FSA.
The Islamic Front is a union of six major Islamist rebel groups, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. Only one of the front’s groups appears to be linked to Al-Qaeda, but all of them want to establish an Islamic state based on Shariah law.
While the rebels probably won’t miss supplies of body armor, communications equipment and U.S. armored vehicles, the symbolism of the decision is that the moderates are being sidelined, as what passes for Western strategy in Syria switches to keeping the jihadists out rather than deposing Assad.
Along with the estimated 110,000 killed during the Syrian conflict, and the 2 million refugees scattered around the region, the alarming rise and success of Islamist groups is the most startling consequence of the West’s failure to stand up to Assad. When this conflict started almost three years ago, coordinated Western support might well have toppled the Syrian president and preserved Syria’s sectarian harmony. But the West’s halfhearted support for the moderate Syrian opposition created a vacuum that the likes of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria willingly filled. Now rebels and noncombatants alike have fallen headlong into a sectarian conflict, embracing the politics of hate as a means of survival.
The British government insists, not for the first time, that the Geneva II conference – now scheduled for January 22, 2014 – will provide the blueprint to end the war and remove Assad from power. This claim would be laughable were it not for the mounting death toll in Syria
The conflict in Syria is not just a civil war. It has become a regional battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As much as Russia and Iran, who have backed Assad with guns and money, need to be behind any peace deal that comes out of Geneva, it is increasingly clear that Saudi Arabia, which along with Qatar bankrolls the rebels, must back it too.
Iran is already a major player in Iraq. The last thing Saudi Arabia wants is for Tehran to end up expanding its regional influence via Syria. This scenario looks increasingly likely for Riyadh, against the backdrop of an apparent thaw between the West and Iran, evidenced by last month’s tentative nuclear deal in Geneva.
The SNC’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, said the coalition is committed to Geneva II. He added, however, that its attendance remains conditional on a guarantee that Assad will not be a part of a transitional government that may be created by the conference. “If that changes in the coming weeks we may change our mind and not attend,” Safur told me recently.
But in reality, whether the SNC attends or not is irrelevant. As in other Middle East conflicts, a deal that does not have the backing of those wielding the guns cannot deliver peace. And as events have shown, the Islamic Front, the Nusra Front, and others are the people who count on the ground, not the SNC or the FSA.
“We’re keeping with the same consistent approach,” a Foreign Office official insisted to me last week. “We’re now focused on Geneva II where that approach will continue.”
Unfortunately, it’s a consistent approach that has so far failed to deliver either an end to the war or an end to Assad rule. While the U.K. has pursued its consistent approach, Assad has unleashed chemical weapons on his people on at least five occasions according to the United Nations; rebel fighters summarily execute people; and tens of thousands of refugees are suffering another bitter winter in makeshift tents in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
I asked the Foreign Office official how many more Syrians the British government expected to die or become homeless before its consistent approach either paid off or was abandoned. He declined to answer.
This really has become the diplomacy of the deaf.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 17, 2013, on page 7.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
By Michael Glackin
The fake sign language interpreter at Nelson’s Mandela’s memorial service wasn’t the only person indulging in meaningless gestures last week. While the interpreter did what amounted to a four-hour version of the Macarena, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to send equally confusing and worthless signals himself, on Syria.
The decision by both the United Kingdom and the United States to “suspend” assistance to a moderate Syrian rebel force, in the face of rising Islamist influence, was a bitter blow to the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army. It underscores their, and indeed the West’s, increasingly marginal role in Syria’s fate.
The FSA and SNC need Western backing to maintain a semblance of credibility and to stop fighters from joining Al-Qaeda-backed groups and other extremist Islamist groups. The West needs the moderate opposition to be effective. The nonlethal provided aid didn’t amount to much, but the symbolism of its suspension will convince everyone from President Bashar Assad to rebel fighters on the ground that an already muddled Western strategy toward Syria is in total disarray.
It also sends a clear signal to those fighting in Syria that the opposition movement that the West helped create cannot rely on the West for even token support. Recall that Cameron successfully overturned the European Union arms embargo on Syria last May in a move intended to “send a clear message to Assad,” but has failed to send as much as a pea shooter to the FSA. Small wonder the extremists, along with Iran and Russia, are in the ascendant.
The aid suspension indicates that the West believes the moderates in the Syrian opposition cannot hold the ring in Syria any longer. While the British Foreign Office insists the move is temporary, it was unable to say when the support would resume.
The events that led to the decision appear to be pretty straightforward: The takeover of Free Syrian Army bases in northern Syria, including the headquarters of the Syrian Military Council, by fighters from the Islamic Front, which recently broke with the FSA.
The Islamic Front is a union of six major Islamist rebel groups, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. Only one of the front’s groups appears to be linked to Al-Qaeda, but all of them want to establish an Islamic state based on Shariah law.
While the rebels probably won’t miss supplies of body armor, communications equipment and U.S. armored vehicles, the symbolism of the decision is that the moderates are being sidelined, as what passes for Western strategy in Syria switches to keeping the jihadists out rather than deposing Assad.
Along with the estimated 110,000 killed during the Syrian conflict, and the 2 million refugees scattered around the region, the alarming rise and success of Islamist groups is the most startling consequence of the West’s failure to stand up to Assad. When this conflict started almost three years ago, coordinated Western support might well have toppled the Syrian president and preserved Syria’s sectarian harmony. But the West’s halfhearted support for the moderate Syrian opposition created a vacuum that the likes of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria willingly filled. Now rebels and noncombatants alike have fallen headlong into a sectarian conflict, embracing the politics of hate as a means of survival.
The British government insists, not for the first time, that the Geneva II conference – now scheduled for January 22, 2014 – will provide the blueprint to end the war and remove Assad from power. This claim would be laughable were it not for the mounting death toll in Syria
The conflict in Syria is not just a civil war. It has become a regional battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As much as Russia and Iran, who have backed Assad with guns and money, need to be behind any peace deal that comes out of Geneva, it is increasingly clear that Saudi Arabia, which along with Qatar bankrolls the rebels, must back it too.
Iran is already a major player in Iraq. The last thing Saudi Arabia wants is for Tehran to end up expanding its regional influence via Syria. This scenario looks increasingly likely for Riyadh, against the backdrop of an apparent thaw between the West and Iran, evidenced by last month’s tentative nuclear deal in Geneva.
The SNC’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, said the coalition is committed to Geneva II. He added, however, that its attendance remains conditional on a guarantee that Assad will not be a part of a transitional government that may be created by the conference. “If that changes in the coming weeks we may change our mind and not attend,” Safur told me recently.
But in reality, whether the SNC attends or not is irrelevant. As in other Middle East conflicts, a deal that does not have the backing of those wielding the guns cannot deliver peace. And as events have shown, the Islamic Front, the Nusra Front, and others are the people who count on the ground, not the SNC or the FSA.
“We’re keeping with the same consistent approach,” a Foreign Office official insisted to me last week. “We’re now focused on Geneva II where that approach will continue.”
Unfortunately, it’s a consistent approach that has so far failed to deliver either an end to the war or an end to Assad rule. While the U.K. has pursued its consistent approach, Assad has unleashed chemical weapons on his people on at least five occasions according to the United Nations; rebel fighters summarily execute people; and tens of thousands of refugees are suffering another bitter winter in makeshift tents in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
I asked the Foreign Office official how many more Syrians the British government expected to die or become homeless before its consistent approach either paid off or was abandoned. He declined to answer.
This really has become the diplomacy of the deaf.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 17, 2013, on page 7.
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Too much deference for the spooks?
The Daily Star
Monday, November 18 2013
by Michael Glackin
It was billed as a historic milestone in parliamentary sovereignty and oversight when the United Kingdom’s spy chiefs appeared before a committee of British parliamentarians and peers over a week ago. However, all it revealed was that Parliament hadn’t a clue what the spooks were up to, and if the committee’s appallingly timid questioning of the spymasters was anything to go by, they never will. The Intelligence and Security Committee is the body charged with oversight of the intelligence services. The spooks were called before it following American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claims that American and British mass surveillance programs included snooping on the emails of millions of ordinary citizens.
During the 90-minute hearing, MI5 boss Andrew Parker, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, and Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, dismissed claims that their monitoring of online and telephone data was excessive, and denied long-standing allegations that British intelligence had been complicit in torture. All without a murmur of dissent from the committee tasked with scrutinizing their activities.
It is extraordinary that no one even mentioned GCHQ’s Tempora program, which allows the agency to hoover up vast amounts of data from cables carrying internet traffic in and out of the country. The information is thoroughly analyzed and then shared with GCHQ’s counterpart in the United States, the National Security Agency.
Considering that neither senior ministers nor the government’s National Security Council, which oversees intelligence coordination and is chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron, were aware of Tempora’s existence before Snowden’s leaks, one would have thought the committee would have been curious to find out more.
Someone, probably one of the three people before the committee, decided that the data trawling did not need explicit parliamentary, or it seems government, approval. Surely it would have been worth asking how that happened? At least in Washington after Snowden’s revelations, President Barack Obama and Congress acknowledged that democratic and judicial oversight had broken down.
When the committee gently asked for examples of the 34 terror plots the spymasters said they had thwarted since the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, or for examples of the damage they claimed Snowden’s leaks had caused to their operations, the spooks replied they could only provide examples in private.
Much of what intelligence agencies do cannot be allowed into the public domain. But this insistence on secrecy amid all we know from Snowden had a distinctly hollow sound to it. It highlighted the unaccountable power that GCHQ, with America’s NSA, has accumulated to invade privacy and hide its activities from democratic oversight by claiming this is necessary for national security.
Sawers, who before heading MI6 served as British ambassador to Egypt and briefly as a special envoy to Iraq in 2003, even took a laughable swipe at the newspaper reporting Snowden’s leaks: “It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee and Al-Qaeda is lapping it up.”
One suspects Al-Qaeda is actually lapping up how Sawers and his colleagues allowed a terror suspect under 24-hour surveillance evade his minders last week by slipping into a burka and wandering off in broad daylight through the streets of central London.
Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have already lapped up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that British intelligence agencies insisted the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed – the reason Parliament supported the Iraq invasion, which arguably has done more to unleash global terrorism than any other.
No doubt terror groups also lapped up what the government called a “serious” security breach a few years ago when an intelligence official lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on Al-Qaeda. The documents were eventually found by a member of the public on a busy commuter train.
There was probably much laughter in the Tora Bora mountains when Sawers’ wife posted details about his personal life on her Facebook page, including photographs of him frolicking around in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks on his holidays. His wife had few restrictions on her Facebook account, which meant that images of the head of the U.K.’s secret service were visible worldwide.
Oddly, Sawers recently gave a rare speech in which he defended the crucial role of secrecy in keeping us all safe. And while the spooks were insisting on privacy again last week, it might have been pertinent to ask why a lowly NSA contractor such as Snowden was among more than 850,000 U.S. staff given access to GCHQ’s secret files. Did GCHQ realize how insecure and open the U.S. system was that it enabled Snowden to leak all the information so easily?
Compare the treatment of the spymasters and the British government’s failure to properly investigate Snowden’s claims with what is going on at London’s Old Bailey, the country’s highest criminal court. A group of journalists and others who worked for Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct newspaper The News of the World are on trial, accused of ordering, or conspiring in, the hacking of the telephone calls of celebrities, politicians and crime victims.
Around $40 million of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on a public inquiry and several police investigations into phone hacking by newspapers culminating in this high-profile trial. Meanwhile the amount the government has spent investigating Snowden’s allegations amounts to a few thousand pounds and some softball questions from a committee that appeared to be in awe of those it is charged with scrutinizing.
Much of what those journalists did is indefensible – the hacking of a 13-year-old murder victim’s phone among them – but which is the bigger crime or threat to civil liberties? Snowden’s revelations dwarf the phone-hacking activities of journalists. Thanks to Snowden we know that the U.S. has been systematically tapping the phones of its allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with GCHQ providing a helping hand.
It has even been reported that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s phone was hacked by the NSA ahead of a meeting Obama at the White House this year. How does this protect our security?
The defense of the spymasters for programs such as Tempora is that they only targeted those involved in terrorism and “serious crime.” The hacking of Merkel’s and Ban’s phones, among others, betrays the lie.
The committee should have shown less deference to the spooks. Their demand for less publicity, lest accountability harm British and Western security, is increasingly threadbare. These are, after all, the same people who failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring. They have much to account for.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Lebanese newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 18, 2013, on page 7.
Monday, November 18 2013
by Michael Glackin
It was billed as a historic milestone in parliamentary sovereignty and oversight when the United Kingdom’s spy chiefs appeared before a committee of British parliamentarians and peers over a week ago. However, all it revealed was that Parliament hadn’t a clue what the spooks were up to, and if the committee’s appallingly timid questioning of the spymasters was anything to go by, they never will. The Intelligence and Security Committee is the body charged with oversight of the intelligence services. The spooks were called before it following American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claims that American and British mass surveillance programs included snooping on the emails of millions of ordinary citizens.
During the 90-minute hearing, MI5 boss Andrew Parker, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, and Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, dismissed claims that their monitoring of online and telephone data was excessive, and denied long-standing allegations that British intelligence had been complicit in torture. All without a murmur of dissent from the committee tasked with scrutinizing their activities.
It is extraordinary that no one even mentioned GCHQ’s Tempora program, which allows the agency to hoover up vast amounts of data from cables carrying internet traffic in and out of the country. The information is thoroughly analyzed and then shared with GCHQ’s counterpart in the United States, the National Security Agency.
Considering that neither senior ministers nor the government’s National Security Council, which oversees intelligence coordination and is chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron, were aware of Tempora’s existence before Snowden’s leaks, one would have thought the committee would have been curious to find out more.
Someone, probably one of the three people before the committee, decided that the data trawling did not need explicit parliamentary, or it seems government, approval. Surely it would have been worth asking how that happened? At least in Washington after Snowden’s revelations, President Barack Obama and Congress acknowledged that democratic and judicial oversight had broken down.
When the committee gently asked for examples of the 34 terror plots the spymasters said they had thwarted since the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, or for examples of the damage they claimed Snowden’s leaks had caused to their operations, the spooks replied they could only provide examples in private.
Much of what intelligence agencies do cannot be allowed into the public domain. But this insistence on secrecy amid all we know from Snowden had a distinctly hollow sound to it. It highlighted the unaccountable power that GCHQ, with America’s NSA, has accumulated to invade privacy and hide its activities from democratic oversight by claiming this is necessary for national security.
Sawers, who before heading MI6 served as British ambassador to Egypt and briefly as a special envoy to Iraq in 2003, even took a laughable swipe at the newspaper reporting Snowden’s leaks: “It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee and Al-Qaeda is lapping it up.”
One suspects Al-Qaeda is actually lapping up how Sawers and his colleagues allowed a terror suspect under 24-hour surveillance evade his minders last week by slipping into a burka and wandering off in broad daylight through the streets of central London.
Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have already lapped up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that British intelligence agencies insisted the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed – the reason Parliament supported the Iraq invasion, which arguably has done more to unleash global terrorism than any other.
No doubt terror groups also lapped up what the government called a “serious” security breach a few years ago when an intelligence official lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on Al-Qaeda. The documents were eventually found by a member of the public on a busy commuter train.
There was probably much laughter in the Tora Bora mountains when Sawers’ wife posted details about his personal life on her Facebook page, including photographs of him frolicking around in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks on his holidays. His wife had few restrictions on her Facebook account, which meant that images of the head of the U.K.’s secret service were visible worldwide.
Oddly, Sawers recently gave a rare speech in which he defended the crucial role of secrecy in keeping us all safe. And while the spooks were insisting on privacy again last week, it might have been pertinent to ask why a lowly NSA contractor such as Snowden was among more than 850,000 U.S. staff given access to GCHQ’s secret files. Did GCHQ realize how insecure and open the U.S. system was that it enabled Snowden to leak all the information so easily?
Compare the treatment of the spymasters and the British government’s failure to properly investigate Snowden’s claims with what is going on at London’s Old Bailey, the country’s highest criminal court. A group of journalists and others who worked for Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct newspaper The News of the World are on trial, accused of ordering, or conspiring in, the hacking of the telephone calls of celebrities, politicians and crime victims.
Around $40 million of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on a public inquiry and several police investigations into phone hacking by newspapers culminating in this high-profile trial. Meanwhile the amount the government has spent investigating Snowden’s allegations amounts to a few thousand pounds and some softball questions from a committee that appeared to be in awe of those it is charged with scrutinizing.
Much of what those journalists did is indefensible – the hacking of a 13-year-old murder victim’s phone among them – but which is the bigger crime or threat to civil liberties? Snowden’s revelations dwarf the phone-hacking activities of journalists. Thanks to Snowden we know that the U.S. has been systematically tapping the phones of its allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with GCHQ providing a helping hand.
It has even been reported that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s phone was hacked by the NSA ahead of a meeting Obama at the White House this year. How does this protect our security?
The defense of the spymasters for programs such as Tempora is that they only targeted those involved in terrorism and “serious crime.” The hacking of Merkel’s and Ban’s phones, among others, betrays the lie.
The committee should have shown less deference to the spooks. Their demand for less publicity, lest accountability harm British and Western security, is increasingly threadbare. These are, after all, the same people who failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring. They have much to account for.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Lebanese newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 18, 2013, on page 7.
The popes and their love of football
The Daily Star
Friday, November 1 2013
by Michael Glackin
Pope Francis has impressed people of all creeds with his humility and modest lifestyle since becoming leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Just as important for many though, is the fact that Pope Francis is also a well-known football fan, the sport that is akin to a global religion, one that that cuts across national and sectarian boundaries, and is played and watched by more than 800 million people, around one in eight of the global population.
Pope Francis can even claim credit for a bit of divine intervention last Sunday, when English Premiership strugglers Sunderland scored a late winner against their local rivals Newcastle United that lifted them off the bottom of the League. In case you missed it, the goal was scored in the dying minutes of the game, by a late substitute who hadn’t scored for the club this season.
A few days before the match, a beaming Pope Francis was photographed in St. Peter’s Square holding aloft a Sunderland football shirt emblazoned with “Papa Francisco” and offered to pray for the club before the big game.
Pope Francis is famously a card-carrying fan of San Lorenzo football club in his native Buenos Aires. Despite being domiciled in the Vatican Francis still pays his monthly club membership subs according to the club’s vice president, Marcelo Tinelli.
He also granted Italy’s and Argentina’s national football teams a private audience at the Vatican in August – an event one Italian newspaper headlined “Pope meets God” in a witty, or for some heretical, reference to Francis meeting Argentinian star Lionel Messi, currently the game’s top player.
But Francis isn’t the first pope to carry his love of the beautiful game into the Vatican.
Although unlikely ever to be photographed enthusiastically waving a football shirt, former Pope Benedict XVI is a supporter of current European Champions Bayern Munich. During his reign the Vatican even organized a team of Catholic priests to play a friendly game against the Palestinian national team in the Al-Khader Stadium outside Bethlehem. Palestine predictably won the match 9-1, although bizarrely the priests somehow managed to get to the end of the first half 0-0.
Pope Benedict granted audiences to a number of, mostly Italian, footballers who ensured he was photographed close to a team shirt, if never quite embracing it ala Francis.
But the papal record for audiences with football teams must surely rest with Pope John II.
He gave the Republic of Ireland football team a private audience during the World Cup in Italy in 1990 and famously revealed to Irish goalkeeper Packie Bonner that he had also played as goalkeeper when he was growing up in Poland.
A few days after meeting the pope, Ireland were knocked out of the World Cup by a single goal. Legend has it that after the match team manager Jack Charlton turned to Bonner and said: “By the way, the pope would have saved that.”
More famously, John Paul II also granted a private audience to Italian club Napoli, which in those days included the brilliant but decidedly temperamental superstar Diego Maradona.
Typically, Maradona arrived at Vatican late and things went downhill at a rate of knots after that when the Argentinian proceeded to have an argument with the pope.
In his book, “I Am The Diego,” published in 2000, Maradona wrote:
“Yes, I argued with the pope. I argued with him because I was in the Vatican and I saw all these golden ceilings and afterward I heard the pope say the church was worried about the welfare of poor kids. So? Sell the ceilings, amigo! Do something!”
In what was likely to have been a quieter Vatican audience in 2004, John Paul II also met and blessed his beloved Polish national team.
He also had a lifetime membership of Barcelona, given to him by the Spanish giants after he celebrated Mass at the Nou Camp stadium in 1982.
In 1987 German club Schalke 04 made John Paul II an honorary member, again, after celebrating Mass at Schalke’s Parkstadion in 1987. Not to be outdone, Schalke’s bitter local rivals, Borussia Dortmund, awarded him the same accolade when John Paul II granted two of their players an audience in 2005 for their work in helping to stamp out child prostitution.
John Paul II is also known as the “protector” of Brazil’s Fluminense. The club’s famous chant is the “A Bênç?o, Jo?o de Deus” – “Bless us, John of God,” a tune composed in the pope’s honor during his visit to Brazil in 1980. Legend has it Fluminense fans burst into the song in 1984, during a tense penalty shootout against rivals Vasco da Gama – Fluminense won the shootout and the Brazilian championship. It would be a quarter of a century before Fluminense repeated the feat.
However, the team John Paul II really supported was Krakow based KS Cracovia. This was the team he watched as a young man, and it appears to have been a love that remained with him throughout his life – just a few months before he died he granted KS Cracovia’s team and staff a private audience, his final meeting with a football club and one of his last Vatican audiences.
Then there’s Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the controversial former Vatican secretary of state who, among other things, called on Catholics to boycott Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Bertone, a lifelong Juventus fan, who used to commentate on their matches for local radio while he was Archbishop of Genoa, has long dreamed of establishing a Vatican football team.
In 2006 he famously said – not entirely in jest – that he wanted to create a team that could compete in Italy’s top flight, “with Roma, Inter Milan, Genoa and Sampdoria.”
“If we just take the Brazilian students from our Pontifical universities we could have a magnificent squad,” he said.
However, Bertone had to be content with establishing the Clericus Cup, the annual football tournament between 16 teams from church seminaries in Rome which is now in its seventh year.
The holders for the last two years have been the North American Pontifical College, so the Clericus Cup is one of the rare (association) football competitions that can be said to be dominated by North America.
Incidentally there is also a Vatican City international team, which has been managed in the past by no less a personage than former Italy and Ireland coach Giovanni Trapattoni.
Vatican City is one of eight fully recognized sovereign states that are not members of FIFA. Its players are drawn from the Swiss Guard and other Vatican staffers but the team has only played three full international matches in 11 years, one draw and two defeats to Monaco. Pope Benedict regularly visited the team when it was in training during his papacy.
But lest football fans get too excited about the papacy’s love of the beautiful game, it is probably worth mentioning that earlier this month, Pope Francis officially launched St. Peter’s Cricket Club.
Undeterred by George Bernard Shaw’s belief that the English weren’t very spiritual “so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity,” Francis hopes the club will forge ties with cricket teams of other faiths, particularly in the Muslim world.
But for all Francis’ global ambition for it, the cricket club’s main aspiration at the moment appears to be what amounts to a local derby match against a Church of England 11 at Lord’s next year. If if he wants to really reach the masses, Francis should stick to The People’s Game.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 01, 2013, on page 7.
Friday, November 1 2013
by Michael Glackin
Pope Francis has impressed people of all creeds with his humility and modest lifestyle since becoming leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Just as important for many though, is the fact that Pope Francis is also a well-known football fan, the sport that is akin to a global religion, one that that cuts across national and sectarian boundaries, and is played and watched by more than 800 million people, around one in eight of the global population.
Pope Francis can even claim credit for a bit of divine intervention last Sunday, when English Premiership strugglers Sunderland scored a late winner against their local rivals Newcastle United that lifted them off the bottom of the League. In case you missed it, the goal was scored in the dying minutes of the game, by a late substitute who hadn’t scored for the club this season.
A few days before the match, a beaming Pope Francis was photographed in St. Peter’s Square holding aloft a Sunderland football shirt emblazoned with “Papa Francisco” and offered to pray for the club before the big game.
Pope Francis is famously a card-carrying fan of San Lorenzo football club in his native Buenos Aires. Despite being domiciled in the Vatican Francis still pays his monthly club membership subs according to the club’s vice president, Marcelo Tinelli.
He also granted Italy’s and Argentina’s national football teams a private audience at the Vatican in August – an event one Italian newspaper headlined “Pope meets God” in a witty, or for some heretical, reference to Francis meeting Argentinian star Lionel Messi, currently the game’s top player.
But Francis isn’t the first pope to carry his love of the beautiful game into the Vatican.
Although unlikely ever to be photographed enthusiastically waving a football shirt, former Pope Benedict XVI is a supporter of current European Champions Bayern Munich. During his reign the Vatican even organized a team of Catholic priests to play a friendly game against the Palestinian national team in the Al-Khader Stadium outside Bethlehem. Palestine predictably won the match 9-1, although bizarrely the priests somehow managed to get to the end of the first half 0-0.
Pope Benedict granted audiences to a number of, mostly Italian, footballers who ensured he was photographed close to a team shirt, if never quite embracing it ala Francis.
But the papal record for audiences with football teams must surely rest with Pope John II.
He gave the Republic of Ireland football team a private audience during the World Cup in Italy in 1990 and famously revealed to Irish goalkeeper Packie Bonner that he had also played as goalkeeper when he was growing up in Poland.
A few days after meeting the pope, Ireland were knocked out of the World Cup by a single goal. Legend has it that after the match team manager Jack Charlton turned to Bonner and said: “By the way, the pope would have saved that.”
More famously, John Paul II also granted a private audience to Italian club Napoli, which in those days included the brilliant but decidedly temperamental superstar Diego Maradona.
Typically, Maradona arrived at Vatican late and things went downhill at a rate of knots after that when the Argentinian proceeded to have an argument with the pope.
In his book, “I Am The Diego,” published in 2000, Maradona wrote:
“Yes, I argued with the pope. I argued with him because I was in the Vatican and I saw all these golden ceilings and afterward I heard the pope say the church was worried about the welfare of poor kids. So? Sell the ceilings, amigo! Do something!”
In what was likely to have been a quieter Vatican audience in 2004, John Paul II also met and blessed his beloved Polish national team.
He also had a lifetime membership of Barcelona, given to him by the Spanish giants after he celebrated Mass at the Nou Camp stadium in 1982.
In 1987 German club Schalke 04 made John Paul II an honorary member, again, after celebrating Mass at Schalke’s Parkstadion in 1987. Not to be outdone, Schalke’s bitter local rivals, Borussia Dortmund, awarded him the same accolade when John Paul II granted two of their players an audience in 2005 for their work in helping to stamp out child prostitution.
John Paul II is also known as the “protector” of Brazil’s Fluminense. The club’s famous chant is the “A Bênç?o, Jo?o de Deus” – “Bless us, John of God,” a tune composed in the pope’s honor during his visit to Brazil in 1980. Legend has it Fluminense fans burst into the song in 1984, during a tense penalty shootout against rivals Vasco da Gama – Fluminense won the shootout and the Brazilian championship. It would be a quarter of a century before Fluminense repeated the feat.
However, the team John Paul II really supported was Krakow based KS Cracovia. This was the team he watched as a young man, and it appears to have been a love that remained with him throughout his life – just a few months before he died he granted KS Cracovia’s team and staff a private audience, his final meeting with a football club and one of his last Vatican audiences.
Then there’s Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the controversial former Vatican secretary of state who, among other things, called on Catholics to boycott Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Bertone, a lifelong Juventus fan, who used to commentate on their matches for local radio while he was Archbishop of Genoa, has long dreamed of establishing a Vatican football team.
In 2006 he famously said – not entirely in jest – that he wanted to create a team that could compete in Italy’s top flight, “with Roma, Inter Milan, Genoa and Sampdoria.”
“If we just take the Brazilian students from our Pontifical universities we could have a magnificent squad,” he said.
However, Bertone had to be content with establishing the Clericus Cup, the annual football tournament between 16 teams from church seminaries in Rome which is now in its seventh year.
The holders for the last two years have been the North American Pontifical College, so the Clericus Cup is one of the rare (association) football competitions that can be said to be dominated by North America.
Incidentally there is also a Vatican City international team, which has been managed in the past by no less a personage than former Italy and Ireland coach Giovanni Trapattoni.
Vatican City is one of eight fully recognized sovereign states that are not members of FIFA. Its players are drawn from the Swiss Guard and other Vatican staffers but the team has only played three full international matches in 11 years, one draw and two defeats to Monaco. Pope Benedict regularly visited the team when it was in training during his papacy.
But lest football fans get too excited about the papacy’s love of the beautiful game, it is probably worth mentioning that earlier this month, Pope Francis officially launched St. Peter’s Cricket Club.
Undeterred by George Bernard Shaw’s belief that the English weren’t very spiritual “so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity,” Francis hopes the club will forge ties with cricket teams of other faiths, particularly in the Muslim world.
But for all Francis’ global ambition for it, the cricket club’s main aspiration at the moment appears to be what amounts to a local derby match against a Church of England 11 at Lord’s next year. If if he wants to really reach the masses, Francis should stick to The People’s Game.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 01, 2013, on page 7.
Saturday, 19 October 2013
The West deludes itself in Afghanistan
By Michael Glackin
Friday, October 18, 2013.
The Daily Star
Biting the hand that has sustained you for a decade is never a smart idea. So Afghan President Hamid Karzai could hardly be surprised at the criticism leveled against him after he said that NATO’s 12-year operation in Afghanistan had brought death and misery, but very little security.
In an interview with BBC Television Karzai said: “The entire NATO exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering and loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure.” He also accused NATO of ignoring Taliban and Al-Qaeda “sanctuaries and training grounds” in Pakistan in preference for airstrikes on Afghan villages, which he called a “violation” of sovereignty. Karzai even suggested that NATO was colluding with the Taliban to justify a continued Western military presence in the country.
Gen. Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, insisted the mission had not been a failure and accused Karzai of being “extraordinarily insensitive” to British soldiers, and of causing “distress” to the families of dead servicemen. The former NATO secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, echoed Dannatt’s comments, and accused Karzai of being “unfair” to the soldiers who had died while protecting his country.
Faked emotional sincerity, traditionally the preserve of actors, now also appears to be the default position for the likes of Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer. That’s because Karzai is right. He’s taken a cheap shot of course, and his comments are also connected to still-not-entirely-resolved negotiations over the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement, which will set the terms for American forces remaining in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal deadline.
But the bottom line is Afghanistan is neither safe nor stable. Criticizing someone for stating the glaringly obvious hardly seems fair. Indeed the real shock is that despite all the evidence, Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer really believe the mission has been a success.
Civilian deaths from the ongoing violence increased almost 25 percent in the first half of this year, according to a United Nations report, while deaths and injuries to women and children jumped 38 percent.
NATO has failed to defeat the Taliban and failed to provide good governance to Afghanistan. Indeed, after next year’s elections and troop withdrawal, it looks increasingly unlikely that much of the centralized political framework established since the invasion will survive.
Dannatt and others can whinge all they want, but Karzai did not criticize the dead; indeed he spoke of the cost to the West in “blood and treasure” in a conflict that has claimed the lives of 444 British servicemen and women and has cost the Treasury, according to the former British government adviser on Afghanistan Frank Ledwidge, more than $59 billion.
Dannatt, who was approached for this article but was unavailable, was the head of the British armed forces for a large part of the war, and before that was responsible for troop deployments to Afghanistan as head of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. De Hoop Scheffer was head of NATO until 2009. Rather than take the moral low ground by complaining about a lack of respect for dead soldiers and their families, it might help if they opened their eyes and explained why Afghanistan today is still closer to chaos than stability.
In his book, “Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure In Iraq And Afghanistan,” Ledwidge forensically examines the army’s tactical and operational failures, exposing a raft of poor decisions by senior personnel that cost the lives of Afghans and soldiers but added nothing to defeating the enemy.
Of course, the Taliban are responsible for many more Afghan civilian deaths than NATO, and military failings are not the only reason for the West’s failure in Afghanistan, nor perhaps even the salient one. But they are a part of it, and it would have better served all those who have been killed in this conflict if Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer had addressed Karzai’s criticism, which they avoided doing.
Indeed, Karzai has been a disaster. Putting him in charge of a country that benefited from massive Western aid was thoroughly irresponsible. But if the West thinks Karzai’s bad, who or what replaces him after next April’s presidential elections could be even worse. Along with a couple of regional warlords, the candidates include Abdul-Rasul Sayyaf, the man who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and whom the U.S. 9/11 Commission Report described as a mentor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It is also understood that some of those convicted for the 2002 Bali bombing, in which 202 people were killed, trained at camps that Sayyaf ran in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Karzai, who appears to have suddenly discovered that previous leaders of his country have suffered for selling out to foreign interests, is belatedly engaged in talks with some Taliban leaders. He has said that he’s open to a power-sharing arrangement with them and it seems clear that the Taliban will enjoy undisturbed control of large parts of the south and east of Afghanistan.
Increasingly, the new Afghanistan that the West set out to build is starting to look worryingly like the old one. If Dannatt and others consider this to be a successful outcome to 12 years of bloodshed and the trillions of dollars spent on Operation Enduring Freedom, then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on October 18, 2013, on page 7.
Friday, October 18, 2013.
The Daily Star
Biting the hand that has sustained you for a decade is never a smart idea. So Afghan President Hamid Karzai could hardly be surprised at the criticism leveled against him after he said that NATO’s 12-year operation in Afghanistan had brought death and misery, but very little security.
In an interview with BBC Television Karzai said: “The entire NATO exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering and loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure.” He also accused NATO of ignoring Taliban and Al-Qaeda “sanctuaries and training grounds” in Pakistan in preference for airstrikes on Afghan villages, which he called a “violation” of sovereignty. Karzai even suggested that NATO was colluding with the Taliban to justify a continued Western military presence in the country.
Gen. Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British Army, insisted the mission had not been a failure and accused Karzai of being “extraordinarily insensitive” to British soldiers, and of causing “distress” to the families of dead servicemen. The former NATO secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, echoed Dannatt’s comments, and accused Karzai of being “unfair” to the soldiers who had died while protecting his country.
Faked emotional sincerity, traditionally the preserve of actors, now also appears to be the default position for the likes of Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer. That’s because Karzai is right. He’s taken a cheap shot of course, and his comments are also connected to still-not-entirely-resolved negotiations over the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement, which will set the terms for American forces remaining in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal deadline.
But the bottom line is Afghanistan is neither safe nor stable. Criticizing someone for stating the glaringly obvious hardly seems fair. Indeed the real shock is that despite all the evidence, Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer really believe the mission has been a success.
Civilian deaths from the ongoing violence increased almost 25 percent in the first half of this year, according to a United Nations report, while deaths and injuries to women and children jumped 38 percent.
NATO has failed to defeat the Taliban and failed to provide good governance to Afghanistan. Indeed, after next year’s elections and troop withdrawal, it looks increasingly unlikely that much of the centralized political framework established since the invasion will survive.
Dannatt and others can whinge all they want, but Karzai did not criticize the dead; indeed he spoke of the cost to the West in “blood and treasure” in a conflict that has claimed the lives of 444 British servicemen and women and has cost the Treasury, according to the former British government adviser on Afghanistan Frank Ledwidge, more than $59 billion.
Dannatt, who was approached for this article but was unavailable, was the head of the British armed forces for a large part of the war, and before that was responsible for troop deployments to Afghanistan as head of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. De Hoop Scheffer was head of NATO until 2009. Rather than take the moral low ground by complaining about a lack of respect for dead soldiers and their families, it might help if they opened their eyes and explained why Afghanistan today is still closer to chaos than stability.
In his book, “Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure In Iraq And Afghanistan,” Ledwidge forensically examines the army’s tactical and operational failures, exposing a raft of poor decisions by senior personnel that cost the lives of Afghans and soldiers but added nothing to defeating the enemy.
Of course, the Taliban are responsible for many more Afghan civilian deaths than NATO, and military failings are not the only reason for the West’s failure in Afghanistan, nor perhaps even the salient one. But they are a part of it, and it would have better served all those who have been killed in this conflict if Dannatt and de Hoop Scheffer had addressed Karzai’s criticism, which they avoided doing.
Indeed, Karzai has been a disaster. Putting him in charge of a country that benefited from massive Western aid was thoroughly irresponsible. But if the West thinks Karzai’s bad, who or what replaces him after next April’s presidential elections could be even worse. Along with a couple of regional warlords, the candidates include Abdul-Rasul Sayyaf, the man who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and whom the U.S. 9/11 Commission Report described as a mentor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It is also understood that some of those convicted for the 2002 Bali bombing, in which 202 people were killed, trained at camps that Sayyaf ran in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Karzai, who appears to have suddenly discovered that previous leaders of his country have suffered for selling out to foreign interests, is belatedly engaged in talks with some Taliban leaders. He has said that he’s open to a power-sharing arrangement with them and it seems clear that the Taliban will enjoy undisturbed control of large parts of the south and east of Afghanistan.
Increasingly, the new Afghanistan that the West set out to build is starting to look worryingly like the old one. If Dannatt and others consider this to be a successful outcome to 12 years of bloodshed and the trillions of dollars spent on Operation Enduring Freedom, then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on October 18, 2013, on page 7.
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Putin and Assad win by a knockout
Friday September 13, 2013
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy was summed up in his famous phrase: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” President Barack Obama’s might be summarized as, “Speak loudly and carry a small stick, then impale yourself on it.” The much talked up, talked down, on, off, missile strike against Syria was never more than a futile gesture. But few could have perceived how ineptly it would be pursued. Like a cheap firework, Obama’s and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to arms made a bit of a bang and fizzled out like a damp squib.
Instead of using military action to weaken Syrian President Bashar Assad, Obama and Cameron have ended up weakening themselves, and indeed their respective offices. Obama has proven himself to be more ditherer in chief than commander in chief, supporting force, but too weak to use it without first spreading the responsibility. Cameron did the same, yet neither was constitutionally obliged to do so.
There is diplomatic wrangling still to come as United Nations inspectors set about securing and dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons while the civil war rages. But make no mistake: Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin have won this round by a knockout.
On the day Assad agreed to allow his arsenal of chemical weapons to be placed under international control, his warplanes were again busy dropping nonchemical bombs on people in areas surrounding Damascus, including the neighborhood of Moadamieh, where around 100 people perished in last month’s chemical attack.
What went wrong? What about Obama’s “red line” and moral duty?
The U.S. president found himself in a corner with a military option that wasn’t worth defending when scrutinized by the American legislature. The only credible reason for intervening in Syria would be to topple Assad. Whether Obama’s intended missile attack was “limited” or bigger than “pinpricks” it was not about securing an end to Assad rule. Consequently, many in the West asked, What’s the point?
Western politicians were falling over themselves to emphasize the limitations of any U.S.-led missile attack, weeks before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s bizarre promise on Monday that the airstrikes would be “unbelievably small.” Even Obama’s remark that the American military “doesn’t do pinpricks” on Tuesday was made in the same breath in which he announced he was delaying military action.
The red line in the Syrian conflict wasn’t Obama’s. It turned out to be Russia’s, Iran’s and Hezbollah’s. Their red line was Assad’s survival and they have stuck to it like glue. For all its talk of moral duty, the West’s commitment to this pales in comparison. When Western states did stir themselves to do something, it consisted of piecemeal, uncoordinated responses to events as they unfolded.
Like arming the rebels and “unbelievably small” missile strikes, warehousing Syria’s chemical weapons is simply the latest shroud to cover the West’s blushes because there is no will to act in Syria.
Assad, almost by accident, has tested not just the West, but specifically America’s capacity, or willingness to be a global power, and he has won. The West has blinked and retreated. It is the U.S. that is really surrendering its arms, not the Assad regime. Assad was even confident enough to publicly warn Americans of terror attacks if the U.S. dared fire a single missile at Syria.
There will be many ill-informed comparisons with Europe in the 1930s, after Obama inadvisably invoked Nazi Germany in his speech on Tuesday night. But one comparison might just be worth making: This month marks the anniversary of the Munich agreement, when along with France, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in an ill-fated bid to avoid taking military action against Adolph Hitler, allowed Nazi Germany to annex a large part of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain spoke for millions when he said he would not enter into “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”
British and American politicians know voters are war weary from botched military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t see the Syrian civil war, or the suffering of the Syrian people at the hands of a brutal dictator, as any of their business. Diplomatic negotiations over the bodies of 100,000 Syrians, and doubtless many more as the war continues, is now all that is left, even if it has been, frankly, fruitless.
Like Europe in the late 1930s, the time when the West could have shaped an outcome favorable to its interests and those of the Syrian people has long passed. The Syrian opposition is even more divided than it was at the outset of the war. The jihadists are fast becoming the major force on the ground and will now gain in strength. And all this has bolstered Iran and Hezbollah as well, which will have serious consequences not just in the Levant, but one suspects further afield too.
It is of course hard to make a case for intervention in a war where both sides are at fault. The latest report on Syria for the United Nations Human Rights Council has said that all sides have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Regime forces have massacred civilians, shelled hospitals and used cluster bombs, while rebel fighters are increasingly guilty of summary executions and torture.
No one wants jihadists running Syria, but can anyone seriously support a Western policy that strengthens Hezbollah? Will the West blink again when Iran stands its ground on its nuclear ambitions?
We have truly lost our moral compass if we believe that standing on the sidelines as the bodies pile up in Syria, or having some chemical weapons decommissioned while allowing Assad to continue to kill his people with impunity, is teaching him or any other tyrant a lesson. The West may well regret not adhering to Roosevelt’s maxim.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 13, 2013, on page 7.
The Daily Star
By Michael Glackin
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy was summed up in his famous phrase: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” President Barack Obama’s might be summarized as, “Speak loudly and carry a small stick, then impale yourself on it.” The much talked up, talked down, on, off, missile strike against Syria was never more than a futile gesture. But few could have perceived how ineptly it would be pursued. Like a cheap firework, Obama’s and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to arms made a bit of a bang and fizzled out like a damp squib.
Instead of using military action to weaken Syrian President Bashar Assad, Obama and Cameron have ended up weakening themselves, and indeed their respective offices. Obama has proven himself to be more ditherer in chief than commander in chief, supporting force, but too weak to use it without first spreading the responsibility. Cameron did the same, yet neither was constitutionally obliged to do so.
There is diplomatic wrangling still to come as United Nations inspectors set about securing and dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons while the civil war rages. But make no mistake: Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin have won this round by a knockout.
On the day Assad agreed to allow his arsenal of chemical weapons to be placed under international control, his warplanes were again busy dropping nonchemical bombs on people in areas surrounding Damascus, including the neighborhood of Moadamieh, where around 100 people perished in last month’s chemical attack.
What went wrong? What about Obama’s “red line” and moral duty?
The U.S. president found himself in a corner with a military option that wasn’t worth defending when scrutinized by the American legislature. The only credible reason for intervening in Syria would be to topple Assad. Whether Obama’s intended missile attack was “limited” or bigger than “pinpricks” it was not about securing an end to Assad rule. Consequently, many in the West asked, What’s the point?
Western politicians were falling over themselves to emphasize the limitations of any U.S.-led missile attack, weeks before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s bizarre promise on Monday that the airstrikes would be “unbelievably small.” Even Obama’s remark that the American military “doesn’t do pinpricks” on Tuesday was made in the same breath in which he announced he was delaying military action.
The red line in the Syrian conflict wasn’t Obama’s. It turned out to be Russia’s, Iran’s and Hezbollah’s. Their red line was Assad’s survival and they have stuck to it like glue. For all its talk of moral duty, the West’s commitment to this pales in comparison. When Western states did stir themselves to do something, it consisted of piecemeal, uncoordinated responses to events as they unfolded.
Like arming the rebels and “unbelievably small” missile strikes, warehousing Syria’s chemical weapons is simply the latest shroud to cover the West’s blushes because there is no will to act in Syria.
Assad, almost by accident, has tested not just the West, but specifically America’s capacity, or willingness to be a global power, and he has won. The West has blinked and retreated. It is the U.S. that is really surrendering its arms, not the Assad regime. Assad was even confident enough to publicly warn Americans of terror attacks if the U.S. dared fire a single missile at Syria.
There will be many ill-informed comparisons with Europe in the 1930s, after Obama inadvisably invoked Nazi Germany in his speech on Tuesday night. But one comparison might just be worth making: This month marks the anniversary of the Munich agreement, when along with France, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in an ill-fated bid to avoid taking military action against Adolph Hitler, allowed Nazi Germany to annex a large part of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain spoke for millions when he said he would not enter into “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”
British and American politicians know voters are war weary from botched military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t see the Syrian civil war, or the suffering of the Syrian people at the hands of a brutal dictator, as any of their business. Diplomatic negotiations over the bodies of 100,000 Syrians, and doubtless many more as the war continues, is now all that is left, even if it has been, frankly, fruitless.
Like Europe in the late 1930s, the time when the West could have shaped an outcome favorable to its interests and those of the Syrian people has long passed. The Syrian opposition is even more divided than it was at the outset of the war. The jihadists are fast becoming the major force on the ground and will now gain in strength. And all this has bolstered Iran and Hezbollah as well, which will have serious consequences not just in the Levant, but one suspects further afield too.
It is of course hard to make a case for intervention in a war where both sides are at fault. The latest report on Syria for the United Nations Human Rights Council has said that all sides have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Regime forces have massacred civilians, shelled hospitals and used cluster bombs, while rebel fighters are increasingly guilty of summary executions and torture.
No one wants jihadists running Syria, but can anyone seriously support a Western policy that strengthens Hezbollah? Will the West blink again when Iran stands its ground on its nuclear ambitions?
We have truly lost our moral compass if we believe that standing on the sidelines as the bodies pile up in Syria, or having some chemical weapons decommissioned while allowing Assad to continue to kill his people with impunity, is teaching him or any other tyrant a lesson. The West may well regret not adhering to Roosevelt’s maxim.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 13, 2013, on page 7.
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